Devon > Devon's Quotes

“But I should be false in the earliest sentiments of my soul, if I suppressed the opinion. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“We are controlled here by our confusion, far more than we know, and the American dream has therefore become something much more resembling a nightmare, on the private, domestic, and international levels. Privately, we cannot stand our lives and dare not examine them; domestically, we take no responsibility for (and no pride in) what goes on in our country; and, internationally, for many millions of people, we are an unmitigated disaster.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“I regretted that I was old, that I could no longer appreciate the education afforded by an American highway, and that I could not grasp the mystery of a single line painted down a road going north.”
― Pat Conroy, The Water Is Wide

“So even before others have a chance to reject us, we have already rejected ourselves”
― Don Miguel Ruiz , The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom

“Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn't even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding the out of comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.”
― Percival Everett, James

“Perhaps I might have been able to believe that there was any loving-kindness to be found in the haven I represented. But I had been in the pulpit too long and I had seen too many monstrous things. I don't refer merely to the glaring fact that the minister eventually acquires houses and Cadillacs while the faithful scrub floors and drop their quarters and dollars into the plate. I really mean that there was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“The history of every Nation is eventually written in the way it cares for its soil.”
― Franklin Roosevelt

“People cannot live without this sense; they will do anything whatever to regain it. This is why the most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“It is entirely unacceptable that I should have no voice in the political affairs of my own country, for I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Once there was a brief-lived demonstration against one of the professors, an old and bearded teacher of Germanic languages, who had been born in Munich and who as a youth attended the University of Berlin. But when the professor met the angry and flushed little group of students, blinked in bewilderment, and held out his thin, shaking hands to them, they disbanded in sullen confusion.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“Years later it was to occur to him that in that hour and a half on that December evening of their first extended time together, she told him more about herself than she ever told him again. And when it was over, he felt that they were strangers in a way that he had not thought they would be, and he knew that he was in love.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“The party was like many another. Conversation began desultorily, gathered a swift but feeble energy, and trailed irrelevantly into other conversations; laughter was quick and nervous, and it burst like tiny explosives in a continuous but unrelated barrage all over the room; and the members of the party flowed casually from one place to another, as if quietly occupying shifting positions of strategy.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“But he knew that the world was creeping up on him, up on Katherine, and up on the little niche of it that they had thought was their own; and he watched the approach with a sadness of which he could not speak, even to Katherine.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“It occurred to him that he ought to call Edith; and then he knew that he would not call her. The dying are selfish, he thought; they want their moments to themselves, like children.”
― John Williams, Stoner: A Novel

“His voice was flat and dry, and it came through barely moving lips without expression or intonation; but his long thin fingers moved with grace and persuasion, as if giving to the words a shape his voice could not.”
― John Williams

“They had simple, gentle, ethical outlooks on life. It was clearly those same friendly, simple peasant fighters who were the ones ready to bear the catastrophic consequences of this war, yet they never had a say in deciding the course of the war.”
― Bảo Ninh, The Sorrow of War

“It was necessary to write about the war, to touch reader's hearts, to move them with words of love and sorrow, to bring to life electric moments, to let them, in the reading and the telling, fell they were there, in the past, with the author.”
― Bảo Ninh, The Sorrow of War

“It is the whispers of friends and ordinary people now attempting ordinary peacetime pursuits which are the most horrifying. Like the case of Father Du, who presided over a very large and happy noisy family. Today, he is the only living male. And Huynh, the tram-driver, whose three sons all died on the battlefield. Like Sinh, wounded in the spine, more dead than alive until he finally died where he had lain for so long.”
― Bảo Ninh, The Sorrow of War

“And into the stories went also the atmosphere of the dark jungle with its noxious scents, and legends and myths about the lives of the ordinary soldiers, whose deaths provided the rhythm for his writing.”
― Bảo Ninh, The Sorrow of War

“The passing of beautiful youth had been so rapid that even its normal periods of anxiety and torment, of deep intrusive blind love, had been taken from him as the war clouds loomed. A moment so close, yet so far, then totally lost to him, to remain only as a memory forever.”
― Bảo Ninh, The Sorrow of War